Bad design awards... bring it!

[Dante_Stella]

I'll open a thread on camera designs - that when exposed during repairs - are just silly.

I nominate the Zeiss-Ikon viewfinder in the Polaroid 250/350/360/450 pack cameras. Undoubtedly designed by the sole employee of Zeiss-Ikon that had not been carted off to a Soviet plant (perhaps the janitor), this item features the following (which I discovered last night while fixing one):

- The most liberal use of a glue gun I have ever seen - with some kind of brown epoxy used to cement all the glass in place. Everyone uses glue, but no one should use that much.

- The highest parts count I have ever seen in a Froelich-patent rangefinder/viewfinder - about double the normal number, by the looks of it. These are all mounted to a monstrously complicated diecast chassis. Based on this and the innards of the locks on my Rimowa luggage, I am now beginning to wonder if there is a specific school of German industrial design that teaches (or taught): (1) making things look clean, simple, and heavy-duty on the outside; (2) making them overcomplicated on this inside; and (3) including one or two flimsy plastic parts in the mechanism.

- The pièce de résistance - a rangefinder vertical adjustment that requires you to grease one side of a screw head and glue the other. The catch, of course, being that part of the viewfinder rides on the screw head, rotating it while you are trying to find the right adjustment.

So what's your "all-time bad design" nomination?

 

[regularchickens]

Now now, it DID have those nice Konica-style growing and shrinking framelines. 😉

What I like much less about it is how it manages to come un-magneted and flip over when I've got the camera pressed up to my face.

 

[mooge]

I nominate the Leicaflex series for their ridiculous complexity. Possibly designed by a crazed Leitz engineer serving a 5-year prison sentance in solitary confinement. some highlights:

-a shutter brake consisting of at least 14 parts. this would be one or two parts in some other cameras (Spotmatic, Zorki 4...). it's pretty big too.

-a central timing shaft. another place to adjust tension for shutter speeds. yaay.

-they stuck with the 'bathtub' design layout, so the shutter to remove the shutter unit, it must come up and out of the camera body. this means that the shutter timing gears, light meter cell, shutter brake, and winding assembly must come out. alot of parts and one big spring I normally wouldn't touch.
the winding gears are particularly not fun to put back, if you mess up, the plate must come off and the wind lever return spring almost always catapults off when you do so.

-a plastic lens release button in the early cameras. seriously? they build a camera so ridiculously overengineered... and put in a plastic lens release button?

here's the best thing:
they reportedly lost money for every camera they sold. and they were really expensive. THAT is how overbuilt they are.

here's the second best thing:
I have two SLs with me right now. neither of them work, one's been in bits for two years.



so maybe it can take 2 million shutter actuations or be reparable after a 20,000 ft fall, and maybe that makes it a great camera, but to me it's just unnecessarily complex.

After all, isn't a Nikon F a modified Leica shutter with a mirror box?

 

[Freakscene]

The Contarex cameras make the Leicaflexes look like the cleanest, simplest designs in photographic history. My nomination for the Contarex's worst design element: lens barrels that have to be heated to get elements out - that shrink on cooling to hold the elements in place. That's not over-engineered or even well engineered, that's just stupid.

Marty

 

[Traut]

The Porsche Boxster engine / transmission power plant. No rebuild available. Just throw the engine in the trash and replace. Rear seals guaranteed to need replacement. A "tune up" is $3k- $4k. 99% of used Boxsters need engine mounts and seals (which don't seal) etc. A great car for the first 50k miles. Etc etc.

 

[mathomas]

The Porsche Boxster engine / transmission power plant. No rebuild available. Just throw the engine in the trash and replace. Rear seals guaranteed to need replacement. A "tune up" is $3k- $4k. 99% of used Boxsters need engine mounts and seals (which don't seal) etc. A great car for the first 50k miles. Etc etc.

Yeah, much better to stick with the tried and true (coming from the owner of a'82 911SC, at 95k+ miles and going strong).

 

[varjag]

-a shutter brake consisting of at least 14 parts. this would be one or two parts in some other cameras (Spotmatic, Zorki 4...). it's pretty big too.

None of those can do 1/2000.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

The Voigtlander Vitessa. You need to take the top plate off to adjust the RF but put it back on to see through the viewfinder. The adjustment is done with three set screws which hold the mirror against a screw in the middle. Stupid balancing act.

 

[sevo]

The Contarex cameras make the Leicaflexes look like the cleanest, simplest designs in photographic history.

That goes for pretty much the entire Zeiss Ikon product line - they generally managed to squeeze in some 25% of extra parts over the more reliable competition. But then, Zeiss was no corporation but a non-profit organisation led by physicists and astronomers. And obviously their objective was not profit, but lowering the entropy of the Universe through the dissemination of mindnumbingly complex products...

 

[pvdhaar]

As an engineer, I somehow have a lot of sympathy for these so called 'bad designs', because often they aren't. They're brilliant solutions to jump 'managerial' hurldes. I bet a lot of other engineers will sympathize and recognize the following:

First you're sent out to build something according to a completely obscure specification, but you make it all fine and elegant and it works like a charm..

Then the guys in charge start to realize what it was that they actually wanted and seem to think 'hey, why don't we also make it flip backward if we twist its ears?' and after a while, you get it so that it does indeed also flip backwards when you twist its ears.. It's a lot less elegant by now; there are some warts in the design, but it still works so it's still somewhat fine.

At this point the guys in charge become over confident; we're now going to crush the competition, so there has got to be a quantum leap in technology in there as well, and it's got to be ready yesterday.. This is where things go bad.. You'd have to start from scratch to get a sound solution, but there's no time, so you're forced to build warts upon warts.. The most amazing thing is that it stil works and does everything, but don't ever look under the bonnet.

Next time you take something apart, and are amazed at what's in there, think about the poor designers that had to do that job of putting it all in there and make it work..

 

[Dante_Stella]

I'm actually vaguely curious about how those came to be on a German component - I think those were patented by Konica and that the design was only licensed to Japanese companies (I'm trying to think of when it hit German cameras - if ever - Plaubel Makina in the 1970s?). Polaroid had a relationship with Tomika, which may have explained how the Japanese frameline design got into a Zeiss finder. Most of the history of postwar camera design went the other way.

Dante

Now now, it DID have those nice Konica-style growing and shrinking framelines. 😉

What I like much less about it is how it manages to come un-magneted and flip over when I've got the camera pressed up to my face.

 

[ferider]

The VW bug's (the original, that is) heating system. Particularly effective when the exhaust has rusted through.

In the camera space, I nominate the "bokeh king" (http://photo.net/leica-rangefinders-forum/00Xqaq).

 

[jarski]

Next time you take something apart, and are amazed at what's in there, think about the poor designers that had to do that job of putting it all in there and make it work..

good thinking. and things havent changed that much over decades, only technology has. in software engineering, similar workarounds and workarounds of workarounds are needed to bring two or more entities talk each other. things that should never have been possible, or foreseen by anybody, and all done of course yesterday. ah I love Microsoft... (...not) 🙂

 

[Keith]

I've always thought this was very funny!

 

[dave lackey]

The Porsche Boxster engine / transmission power plant. No rebuild available. Just throw the engine in the trash and replace. Rear seals guaranteed to need replacement. A "tune up" is $3k- $4k. 99% of used Boxsters need engine mounts and seals (which don't seal) etc. A great car for the first 50k miles. Etc etc.

Yeah, this is for real! Doubles the price of a used Boxster!😛 Just before the recession, I looked into buying one and found out about this wonderful engine on the Boxster forum.... what a joke.😡

 

[Keith]

Yeah, this is for real! Doubles the price of a used Boxster!😛 Just before the recession, I looked into buying one and found out about this wonderful engine on the Boxster forum.... what a joke.😡

I must be a German thing ... at least half the Leicas I've bought in the last few years have needed a CLA!

 

[farlymac]

The Germans were very particular about not infringing on others patents, since there were stiff penalties for doing so. So they had to reinvent the mousetrap every time a new camera came along. Complexity compounded because you didn't license someone elses design. Oh no, too proud for that, we'll come up with something new to accomplish the same thing.

So when the Japanese began to build their cameras, they looked at the German designs, and (other than copying the outward looks) they just simplified tha complexity out of the German cameras.

Kodak on the other hand, seemed to go out of their way to make things difficult for anyone to work on their cameras. Like using rivets instead of screws. But that was because they used workers with a lower skill set for assembly, to keep the price down, and production numbers up.

PF

 

[Vickko]

Ha ha.

And I quibble, when I tried to fix the vertical alignment of a Contax IIa, and found that the critical optical element was GLUED in. No way to adjust it. Had to unglue the lens, shim it with metal and then glue the whole thing back together, and pray that it didn't shift during curing.

 

[filmfan]

Anything that is not a Leica M is badly designed.

 

[monochromejrnl]

My vote goes to the pentax lx vf prism. For such an incredibly well designed body they used a very poorly constructed vf. The diopter adjustment consists of two small plastic geas the push a glued lens assembly back and forth, everything was liberally coated in a grease that ate away at the foam/rubber seals and turned into muck.

The mirror return rubber bumped on the lx that commonly disintegrates is also rather shocking for an otherwise incredible camera.